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Hillary said it wrong but got it right about hard working white Americans

If there were ever words that Hillary Clinton should take back it’s her retort that hard working whites backed her in the primaries. The implication was that whites are the only ones who work hard. She obviously didn’t mean that. Her awkwardly put point was simply that Obama has not cracked the resistance to him of blue collar, rural, and non-college educated, lower income whites.

Obama will try to overcome that resistance by fingering McCain for Bush’s economic bumbles. This is the one issue that should resonate with blue collar whites who are hurting more than anyone else from a near decade of bad Republican economic policies. But economic misery hasn’t been enough for any Democratic presidential contender or even president to dent that resistance in the past three decades. And Hillary’s lousy word play notwithstanding their resistance can’t be shrugged off solely as racial bigotry, guns and religion fetishes, and cultural gaps between blue collar whites and blacks and the so-called elite.

Bill Clinton said and did all the right things about the economy and snatched the White House from Bush Sr. in 1992. But he didn’t do it by getting a majority of blue collar white votes. Bush Sr. narrowly beat him with them. Four years later, the economy boomed, jobs were plentiful, and Clinton got the credit for this. Yet he still lost to GOP challenger Robert Dole by an even greater margin among blue collar whites than he did to Bush Sr. four years earlier. If women had not turned out in large numbers and voted heavily for him, Dole may well have beat him out, and he would have done it with the massive backing of blue collar whites.

There are two big reasons for the locked in resistance of blue collar white males to Democratic presidential contenders that have been totally missed in all the usual talk about cultural differences and sneaky racism. That is that many of them perceive the messages that GOP male candidates convey and the code words and terms they use to convey them much different than women, blacks and upper income, college educated whites.

GOP presidential candidates and presidents in past decades have at various times skewered social programs and nakedly played the race card in presidential campaigns beginning with Goldwater in 1964. Since then other Republicans at times artfully stoked male rage with racially charged slogans like “law and order,” “crime in the streets,” “welfare cheats,” and “absentee fathers.” Bush’s John Wayne frontier brashness, and get tough, bring em’ on rhetoric in talking about the Iraq and the war against terrorism was calculatingly geared to appeal to supposed male toughness.

The other reason is that Republicans have just as artfully played hard on the anger, frustration, and visceral dislike of many white workers harbor toward government. The angry white male was more than a cleverly coined buzz word in the 1990s to describe the fear, frustration, and the sense that males, particularly white males, were losing ground to minorities and women in the workplace, schools, and in society. The trend toward white male poverty and alienation actually first became evident in the early 1980s when more than 9 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls and more than half were from white, male-headed families. Two decades later, the number of white men in poverty or among lower income wage earners continued to expand. The estimate was that more one in five white males who voted in 2004 made less than $45,000 in household income.

The main culprit was always a big, bloated federal government that tilted unfairly in spending priorities toward social programs at the expense of head of household male wage earners and taxpayers, at least that’s how the GOP politicians were able to craft the reason for the anger and alienation that many white males felt toward government and that translated out to even more fear anger and distrust of liberal Democrats.

McCain will again snatch this well-worn page from the GOP playbook, and do what every GOP presidential candidate has done going back to Reagan and that’s tag Obama as a far out left liberal who’s wildly out of touch with and even threatens blue collar white males. He’ll endlessly cite Obama’s moderately liberal voting record and statements on abortion, taxes, and judicial appointments. Republican strategists are rubbing their hands in giddy anticipation that the freshly minted “Hillary Democrats” (blue collar whites that traditionally vote Democratic) are very much in play for McCain.

The idea is to bag the blue collar white male vote, especially in the South, by reinforcing the deep suspicion of many conservative males that the Democratic Party is a hopeless captive of special interests, i.e. minorities, gays, and women, and that white men especially are still persona non grata in the party.

Hillary said it wrong but got it right about the hard working, white Americans that back her and not Obama. The supreme test for Obama is to prove that Hillary said it wrong and got it wrong. The West Virginia primary is yet another litmus test to see if he can.

Excuse me, but whites have had a 400-year head start on economic prosperity in this country and denied hard working, law abiding blacks from participating in the American economic engine by Jim Crow laws, and racist intimidation. I’m not the one to want social programs to continue. I’m a strong, college-educated black man whose ancestors endured the harshest conditions to cross the Atlantic Ocean only to become slaves in this county. I’m proud because only the strongest of slaves on the passenger ships made it! Their healthy genes have been passed on to most of us who have become the best-respected doctors, lawyers, maids, television superstars, and a possible presidential candidate etc., in spite of the overt and persistent racism that white folks continue to deny exist in this country.

So no, I have no respect for the opinion that white folks have fallen by the wayside because of affirmative action, etc. Since the beginning of this country, white males in America have controlled the path of economic policies, controlled the money supply, made up the majority of (racist) law enforcement, and determined the status quo requirements! So, of all groups to complain, white folks have no business complaining about how they’ve been overlooked…they’ve had the opportunity to succeed by association alone.